Quotes About Literature

She was watching me out of the corner of her eye. She put a hand to her white hair. I said hi toots you got a match? Hepzibah Dodd smiled a faded smile. She picked up her copy of An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. By Adam Smith. She stood and grabbed my arm. She had a grip like a brand-new bear trap. Her voice was quavery. She said of course big boy. She said in my apartment.

including the partial copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things—unseen by scholars for more than five hundred years—and eight previously unknown speeches of Cicero.

The Latin verb "to fasten" was pangere, from which, via the Latin pagina, the word "page" descends. Suddenly it was possible to read a document by turning pages of parchment rather than unspooling a roll of papyrus.

The soft throb and glow roused in my breast by the gilt letters of four or five different languages winking at me from scores of handsomely tooled bindings—the sight of so much knowledge so beautifully presented—swiftly flamed out.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes," [T.S. Eliot] wrote, "who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

When it's summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. Put The Idiot in your lap or over your face, and you know where you are going to be for the afternoon.

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.

Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature.

But authorship is not to be denied. Not even if you are Thomas Pynchon and stonewall all attempts to establish your actual existence. My own feeling is that Pynchon does not exist, and neither do the last five hundred pages of Gravity's Rainbow, but there is no question whatsoever that Thomas Pynchon is an author.

While other novelists were worrying about money and struggling to turn in chapters overdue at their publishers, Trollope was prospering and remaining ahead of schedule. While one of his novels was being serialized, he usually had at least one other completed novel, often two or three, awaiting publication.

A Writer's Reference

Modern English Usage

Un buen libro es el mejor de los amigos, lo mismo hoy que siempre.

Las letras, como las flores, como las frutas, como los pueblos, suelen sufrir epidemias que las devastan y desfiguran.

Eu leio antropofagicamente: quero devorar aquele que escreveu

Literatura é sempre sobre o que não é. É um bruxedo para o retorno do que já foi.

A book is the only immortality.

The book is the only immortality.

My American friends were full of kindly scorn when I announced that I was going to Canada. "A country without a soul!" they cried, and pressed books upon me, to befriend me through that Philistine bleakness.

A book may be compared to your neighbor; if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

I'm not a great poetry fan.

I began to think that my life, although profoundly boring on the surface, was quite interesting in literary terms.